What is Reddit's opinion of SuperDuper!?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Super Duper. It's a backup utility that allows you to create a fully bootable backup of your entire hard drive. The only thing you can't do with the free version is use the scheduler.

Umm.. from the sound of it, you're looking to swap out a hard drive in an official Apple laptop, right? This forum is for hackintoshes (i.e. PC hardware running OSX), but no worries bud! I'll still see if I can answer some questions for you.

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1. Yep! You absolutely can do a backup & restore. Most success stories I've seen use software like <em>CCC</em> or <em>SuperDuper</em> to accomplish this, as you need to make sure you copy the whole disk and not just the main data partition.
2. Absolutely correct - that part is pretty straightforward.
3. Honestly, when using CCC or SuperDuper, you can actually just restore the backup you created onto the fresh SSD (obviously before you install it into the MacBook).
4. This is handled through CCC or SuperDuper on the host computer (the one doing the backups).
5. This part is the funnest!

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CCC and SuperDuper assume you're using a Mac as a host computer to do the backups. If you're using a Windows machine, there might be a way to do it? But since Windows doesn't natively read or write HFS+ file systems, things can get more complicated.

I hope that helps some, and I'm sure your girlfriend will be very happy with it! Let me know if you have more questions and I'll see what I can do :)

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Side note - I have no problem helping you out with this, but you might also get more ideas posting in /r/Apple, /r/Mac, or /r/OSX

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Edit: As for this question:

>are there any brands I should avoid or size requirements I'll need to keep in mind? I was thinking a Samsung EVO 240 GB

I use a pair of Samsung 850 Evo 500GB SSDs in my rig, one for OSX, one for Windows 10 - and they work wonderfully. I might advise a larger drive as 240 can get cramped. I feel fairly comfortable with the 500 - but I also have 7TB of HDD storage, so I can offload a bunch onto that.

I did it with SuperDuper. My SSD came with an SATA to usb cable and I just plugged in the drive and SuperDuper copied the drive one on one.

Works great, depending on the speed of the USB and drive. I have a spare SSD with a USB3 connector and it's actually pretty fast. Use SuperDuper! to make a bootable backup copy of your existing system.

Make a clone of your hard drive using an external disk and Carbon Copy Cloner (free) or SuperDuper! (commercial).

>1.6.8

Assuming you mean 10.6.8.

>Is there any cloning software that runs on 1.6.8 I can use?

Yes. Older versions of SuperDuper (free; $27.95 license unlocks extra features) are available from the right-hand sidebar, under System Requirements.

>The "Press option upon restart" doesn't work for whatever reason. I only have the option to boot from my normal HD.

It's working just fine. Holding Option brings up the Startup Manager, allowing you to choose another device to boot from. If there are no other devices to boot from, like an external hard disk or a CD, you won't have any other options there. There is no drive cloning feature in the Startup Manager.

>2) Will I have any problems with my phone?

I don't see why you would. On the off chance that changing the hard disk causes iTunes to see it as a 'new' computer, you can deauthorize your computer from iTunes before cloning it, and then reauthorize it once you've finished the upgrade.

>I am really afraid of losing all of that by upgrading.

Impossible. Any music and apps you've bought off the iTunes Store can always be redownloaded because they're associated with your account. It doesn't matter if you delete every copy of them in existence. All you have to do is log back into your account on your phone or computer and download what you want again.

If you have music that wasn't purchased on the iTunes Store, that obviously won't be covered, but you're cloning the disk so you'll still have all the files.

Carbon Copy Cloner ($40) and Super Duper ($28) are the two best (only?) ones I know of. They both have free trials.

Before you have it replaced clone the OS to an external drive using something like Super Duper.

Once replaced boot your machine to the external drive (hold option at boot then select the external drive as the boot source) then clone it back onto the new drive.

Your machine's firmware supports running that version OS. This isn't negated with a parts replacement (including the drive).

Edit: iTunes 10.7 should run on Yosemite. It's newer Apple apps that are restricted from running on older versions of OSX - try it

Take a look at the software from The Omni Group. Best of breed productivity apps, if any of their offerings fills a need. http://www.omnigroup.com/

Microsoft OneNote for Mac is actually pretty solid. As is the Mac Evernote client.

Get a copy of SuperDuper to do full-image backups of your machine: http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

VMWare Fusion if you still need some Windows apps.

Pixelmator for your image editing needs, if you aren't a Photoshop user.

Time machine is an interesting and effective backup option, but it doesn't create bootable images/backups. Instead, if you need to restore a backup, you boot into an OSX Recovery partition and use the "Restore from Time Machine Backup" option.

EDIT: quick edit to add that if you want to manage your own backups, you might like superduper: http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html or look into rolling your own command line setup with rsync: http://www.rsync.net/resources/howto/mac_rsync.html

I use SuperDuper! to do an incremental copy from my main HDD to the backup HDD. Some people prefer Carbon Copy Cloner. Based on slightly better reviews, I tried SD first, it worked good enough for me, and I've stuck with it.

My workflow is to, at the end of the day, plug in the external HDD and run SuperDuper! After the copying is done, it finishes by shutting down the computer, as I told it to do.

These are Mac programs. I have no recommendations for Windows / Linux systems.

I assume it's a File Vault 2 encrypted disk, meaning it was first encrypted with OS X Lion 10.7 or later.

Once it is mounted at work, have you tried running Disk Utility on it to see if it needs to be "repaired"?

Another idea is plug in everything at work except the drive. Open up the Console application in /Applications/Utilities/

There's always going to be a ton of stuff in there, but click the "Clear Display" button at the top, and then plug in the drive. See what shows up.

There will probably be nothing but maybe there will be something.

If it was me and I couldn't solve it any other way, I'd probably erase the Time Machine drive and start it over again. (Since 10.8, Time Machine can use multiple destination drives and alternate among them)

BUUT don't leave yourself without a current backup. Use another drive via Time Machine or a hard drive cloning application like Super Duper.

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

SuperDuper is hands down the best cloning program out there. It makes BOOTABLE backups so if you really have HDDs fail, you aren't up a creek.

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Raid systems are a good choice. The studio I work at has an 8 terabyte glyph drive as our main backup. It's technically 4x 2TB. We have it set up that 4tb is backup 1, and 4tb is backup 2.

The plus side to having a clone drive: you can take it to another Mac at a different studio, boot right up from it, and its like you never left your own studios computer.

Edit: Ditch time machine. It's slow, cumbersome, and is a processor hog.

Yes. Its not quite free, but its as good as:

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

It's SuperDuper, and in the pre-time machine world, it was status quo for OS X users. It's just a GUI for tried and true back end automagic, like tar and gzip.

So use that, share that NTFS volume with SMB on the windows side, and mount it on the OS X side.

As far as your long filenames problem, it doesn't matter in a tarball-- since it's a flat file with a single filename that can be any length you want. You just wont be able to untar it reliably on an NTFS volume, move it back to something POSIX compliant for that sort of shenanigan.

All of that said, you could also always do tar -zcvf /path/to/ntfsmount/backup.tgz /

This however will not reliably back up things like internal OS X databases that control things like users, groups, some permissions, some preferences, and mail. It will back up regular files just fine though.

Get one of these and use SuperDuper to clone the existing drive data onto the new drive.

Updating replaces the previous operating system, yes. If you'd like to be able to restore Sierra in case the update causes problems, you can use an external drive and a utility like SuperDuper (free; $27.95 license unlocks extra features) to create a complete backup of your Mac first. If the update causes issues, you can boot into macOS Recovery and restore from the backup using Disk Utility.

Time Machine restores the backup to a fresh install of MacOS, to make it easy to reinstall, and migrate your data to a new computer. The backups are not bootable, so you you need to install the OS before restoring.

If you want to port your disk from you HD to and SSD in one move, you can use Superduper and copy the whole drive to the SSD before installing it using a USB to SATA cable, keep in mind the HD and SSD needs to be the same size if not more as to fit all of the data.

/u/TronLightyear was a bit short with you, but (s)he's right. Repartitioning the disk isn't the issue; you don't have enough free space on the disk for the 50 GB partition Boot Camp wants. You cannot "resize the empty space partition" because the free space is exactly that—free space, i.e. not a partition.

Since you found that deleting additional data still left you unable to install Windows 10 (not "Microsoft 10"; Microsoft is a company, not a product) via Boot Camp, I agree with the folks at the Apple Store. The fastest solution is to just back up your data, wipe the drive, and then restore it.

You can back up the data to an external drive quite easily with SuperDuper (free; $27.95 license unlocks extra features). When you're finished, you can use SuperDuper or Disk Utility to restore the backup to the freshly-erased disk.

I use FreeFileSync (Open source, written in C++) to keep all my photo's backed up https://www.freefilesync.org/

so basically you would be able to clone your drive to another one, then sync whatever files back you need or completely restore when needed. You could always zip of the files too, but I think you won't get a carbon copy with that.

I've also used Super (OSX Native in Objective-C) to clone my HD and write it back to my new SSD and it worded perfect as well and it does do carbon copies. If you look around for an older version you can get a free copy as they just recently started to charge money

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

One way would be to make a complete, bootable backup on an external disk, using a tool like SuperDuper (free, extra features available if you buy a license). This is useful in two ways:

• You can boot into Recovery HD, as you did before, and use Disk Utility to "restore" the backup to your computer's internal disk.
• If something goes wrong with your computer, you can connect the external disk, hold down Option while the computer boots to access the Startup Manager, and boot from the backup instead.

If you have a tool (or tools) like Drive Genius or DiskWarrior, install it before you make the backup. Then, if you have problems later (or you just want to do some preventative maintenance), you can boot from the backup and run those tools on your computer's internal disk, which won't be in use, since you booted from the backup.

For the record, you can also use SuperDuper to make regular backups of your hard disk, to restore your data in case of a drive failure or accidental file deletion, for example.

For what it's worth, I use two external drives: I backup one with Time Machine and the other one I backup with Super Duper. I alternate every other day or so. Super Duper is a sweet little program that makes the disk bootable and is just more straightforward for my old pre-DOS geek brain. http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Backup your hard drive, do a clean install an only copy back the necessary stuff, but keep the backup just in case. SuperDuper can do a one on one copy of your HDD.

Also your a bit late on spring cleaning, try to keep it on time next time.

Exactly what I was going to suggest. If it were me, I'd just connect the SSD via a cheap USB to SATA bridge and then use terminal and "dd" to block level copy the disk over but most Mac users I know that support customers, friends or family use SuperDuper to do the same thing.

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html Get the free version and copy to your new SSD, then swap disks.

Time Machine only backs up user files and applications and their data. Do what /u/twentythree-nineteen says - use CCC or you can use SuperDuper which has a free version that will do a clone.

If the Mac's hard drive isn't too full, you may be able to get a TM backup and a clone on the same external drive. Once you make a clone you'll be able to boot your Mac using the image on the External Drive.

As for iOS development, if you purchase an Apple iOS Developer account ($99/year) then you get access to free versions of OS X also. Of course, you get OS X for free also on the App Store.

You didn't say what kind of Mac you have and it's age - if it's reasonably new then you can always install OS X via Internet Recovery which requires only an Internet connection.

I know this does not directly answer either one of your questions, but it will address both of the concerns you have.

Just use something like SuperDuper to copy your current drive onto the drive you want to replace. The free version should do the job just fine.

This way, when you install the new drive it will be like nothing has changed. It's the least amount of hassle.

In order to be able to write to the SSD before you physically install it, you will need either a disk enclosure, or a SATA to USB cable. Should not cost more than $15.

1. Plug the SSD to your Macbook using the cable mentioned above or an enclosure.
2. Format your SSD using Disk Utilities to match the same settings as your current drive.
3. Use super duper to copy your current HD contents onto the SSD.
4. Power off the Macbook and replace the HD with the SSD.

Let me know if that makes sense and if you need any help with any of the steps.

Are you going to put the SSD in where the Optical drive is or replace the existing hard drive?

OWC makes a kit to put an SSD in your optical drive bay: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/drive_bracket/datadoubler/

Overall, the HD replacement really isn’t terrible. SuperDuper can clone the whole drive from one to the other.

Ground yourself if possible before opening the case (a wrist strap is ideal, but probably not strictly necessary if you aren’t wearing a fleece while taking it apart and you touch metal first). Disconnect the battery as the first thing when you take it apart.

If you really are putting the drive in the optical drive bay you will have to disconnect some very delicate cables. Be careful, if you snap them, you could be in for a very expensive repair. (particularly the cables that run into the screen as those are integrated)

Zap your PRAM after the drive replacement (command + option + P + R until your machine chimes twice while turning on)

SuperDuper! Is a good app for this as well. It creates a complete copy of your drive, which is bootable if the source drive is. That means your back up can be plugged into any other Mac and accessed as though you're on your home computer.

The smart copy you're talking about is only available on the paid version, last I checked. But you can try the free one and see what you like. Full is around $28.

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Time machine does include external volumes. Make sure they aren't listed in the "ignore" section of the control panel.

I have two time machine drives and a media drive. The media drive is always attached to my shared Mac along with one of the backup drives. The other backup drive is at work and i swap them weekly. Time machine backs up the shared Mac, the attached media drive, and two MacBooks. Both drives backup everything.

I'm not sure if you can set separate rules per drive... I haven't looked into that, but you may want to look into third party backup tools like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper.

I have found Time Machine to be sufficient for my needs, and it has saved my hide more than once!

If you are wanting to copy your computer to a new hard drive, try SuperDuper – it can clone your disk while it's working. Carbon Copy has the same features, but I can't personally vouch for it.

You could clone your disk using Disk Utility, which is included on your Mac, but it'll take a little more time.

Okay, you'll be fine. Here's the process I used to move my MacBookPro from a HDD to SSD.

There's an app called SuperDuper, that will help you out. The free version is fine for this.

Boot off the HDD, then launch Disk Utility and erase the SSD. Launch SuperDuper and set it to copy from the HDD to SSD. Depending how much data you have, this will take time.

Once it's done, you can test the SSD by rebooting and holding down the Option key. You should see the HDD and SSD. Select the SSD and your mini will boot from it. If all's well, you can move the SSD into your mini.

Hope that helps.

I just upgraded to the 840 evo. It was super easy. I didn't have any trouble at all. I cloned it with SuperDuper! before I installed it, and that was probably the easiest way to do it. It's free, and you don't have to worry about restoring from Time Machine. Make sure you have a SATA to USB adapter if you go that route though. Good luck!

Plug in an external hard drive, do a Time Machine backup (and make sure it worked!) then wipe your hard drive/ssd and reinstall OS X. When it prompts you for your data from another computer during first-time setup, choose to restore from Time Machine backup and plug in the hard drive you backed up to. Quickest and easiest way, IMO.

If your computer is working fine and you're just replacing the hard drive, you're fine to clone it, if you'd like. Use SuperDuper!

Try a virtual machine like Parallels. You should always have a back up. Worst case scenario, just make a copy of your important stuff like tax documents, family pictures, music, and stuff like that. That isn't 460gb worth of data. Check out SuperDuper for your back ups I've never used it but I hear it's great and you don't really have to pay for it to use it.

This variant might help as well:

• Split your first, now empty partition into the size you want for your Yosemite installation after you're done and the surplus. You will have three partitions.
• Use a tool like Super Duper to clone your current Yosemite partition into the first, empty partition.
• Check if this was successful and boots as you want it.
• Now delete your old Yosemite partition and the empty partition. Use that space to let the Bootcamp utility create your Bootcamp partition.

EDIT: If you want your Bootcamp partition to be 50 GB, you can of course skip the part with splitting your first partition.

So it's been about...6-7 years since I did a major update round, but here's what you're to options are.

Option 1) Update via packages/ASWU: using ARD push packages to all machines and have them run updates. This is trickier for full OS updates (10.6 to 10.7 for example). Adobe's updates used to be able to be downloaded and ripped apart into packages, not sure if this is still the case.

Option 2) the pro option: Grab 1 machine, erase it, and start from scratch and get it updated and ready to the standard you want. And then

Option 2 sub option A) use something like DeployStudio (free) running on a server to image it, then push all those images over the network to all your new machines with an option boot (also there's a way to ARD script this but it's been a long time),

Option 2 Suboption B) AKA the "fuck servers". After creating your stable image use a firewire cord, or thunderbolt cord to connect to a second machine in target disk mode (original machine is on and running second machine in target disk mode) and use something like SuperDuper! (free) to clone from machine 1 to machine 2. Repeate, but now with more machines. Note: this option sucks if you don't have all your machines close. Alternative is to use an external hard drive/usb stick

Thats what I would do, personally.

You should ultimately erase the Time Machine backup drive and start it over.

But don't do it before you buy another backup hard drive and either do a Time Machine backup to it or use a Disk cloning software like Super Duper:

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Basically, the old backup is hosed for more updates. But don't erase your only backup until you have another spare backup.

1. I use Super Duper to clone my hard-drive once every week or two.
2. I use Arq - I love Arq.

Backing up is so stupidly simple. You are a fool if you don't do it, but its one of those things: you don't appreciate the value in it until you experience the loss (and that loss is pretty much inevitable if you don't keep backups). Even just copying your important stuff and sticking it in dropbox is better than nothing. Thats what I do when I'm traveling. I just put everything in my dropbox and when I get back to my studio I copy everything onto actual hard drives.

For Professional Producers

If you do this for a living, I seriously recommend keeping an onsite and offsite backup. What I mean by this is keep one backup drive in your studio, and have another in a safety deposit box at your bank. Once a month, you want to swap them out so your studio drive with its most recent backup goes in the safety deposit box and your safety deposit box drive comes back to get updated. It seems like a lot of work, but if you are robbed, have a fire, flooding, water damage, etc (or if you live in a place where you have hurricanes, forest fires etc), you are completely protected.

On my mac, I use an application called Super Duper to clone my hard drives (it also performs smart updates, only adding and changing files that have been altered). It's stupidly cheap and does the job wonderfully.

If you have any questions about my system, feel free to PM me.

Super Duper! is the best way to clone a drive to another one for your purposes. You can do it without paying a dime. Aside from buying another hard drive.

Things will probably be faster after you do that since you'll have eliminated both directory and data fragmentation. Of course no matter what you do a 3 year old laptop won't be the fastest thing in the world.

DiskWarrior and iDefrag will accomplish the same as what I suggest for more money, but it is always good to have a backup.

SuperDuper! will help, you may need to get an external enclosure to assist you in the transfer.

EDIT: Happy Reddit Birthday.

It sure sounds like your hard drive is dying or dead. If you are under warranty, you should definitely take it to the nearest Apple store. They will replace it for you and FedEx it back to you overnight free. I just had to do this with my six-month-old MBP.

It doesn't help much now, but for future reference, if you don't know about it already, SuperDuper is the best backup utility there is. I use it for bootable backups.

I have used SuperDuper for this purpose for years. It will allow you to backup your Mac to a USB volume. You can then boot your Mac with the USB drive plugged in and hold down option to boot from your backup. Basically running your computer in the state it was when it was backed up from the USB.

You also have the option to create a bootable image after each backup that lets you capture snapshots.

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Yeah, it would have to be either USB or Thunderbolt. Shouldn't matter as long as it shows up in Disk Utility and has enough free space to install macOS. I would recommend a faster Thunderbolt drive since its maximum transfer speed is super fast but honestly it shouldn't matter that much.

You can even use a free application called SuperDuper to make a full bootable direct clone of your existing Mac drive.

But if you're brave enough and can easily afford the iFixit kit, then an internal SSD is going to be better.

Sorry, I don't quite get what you are trying to do, but I think that this should help.

SuperDuper lets you make a fully bootable backup of any volume in your computer (an external hard drive, your boot drive, etc).

If you have a running VM with the image you want to use, run super duper form inside the VM, and make it point to the external hard drive that you want to boot from in the future.

However, I don't think that it will clone boot loader, etc; so it may be a bit tricky -- I've never attempted to use Super Duper outside of an actual mac. In theory it could work?

> I think what would be best is a cloud backup of really important files, plus full disk images every [week/month/2months/6months/year] on a separate hard drive.

I'm doing the first part, but need help with the second part. Also, what's the difference between a clone and an image?

What's the best way to back up an external hard drive? I'm using a Mac, by the way.

I have an external hard drive that's being backed up with CrashPlan. That has the majority of the files I care about.

But I'd like to make a physical backup of it too onto other hard drive. That's the goal.

I'm just worried about trying to copy too much at once and killing the hard drive. Did that once when I was trying to make a backup of all my travel photos. Thank God the backup to the new hard drive finished before the original hard drive died. Probably more than what should be done via copy-and-paste command. Need a better process, or maybe software.

When I did some Google searches, I came across SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC). Would you recommend using one of those, or some other software? Any other Mac users are welcome to chime in.

I've also thought of having another cloud backup, like using Arq Backup connected to Amazon Cloud Drive. I've looked at Backblaze but I think they only hold your most recent 30 days of files, I want to store stuff forever.

You can back up your Mac to an external drive using SupertDuper, the free version will copy your whole drive.

Then do your clean install. Connect the external drive, mount the disk image, and drag&drop whatever files you want to bring back on the computer. It'll copy everything, so no worries about missing a folder somewhere.

Backups are your friends! It took me some four or five hard disk failures to learn that. Don't put yourself through what I did, haha.

In the future, SuperDuper (free; $27.95 license unlocks extra features) and an external hard disk make backups really convenient. Going out for a while? Before you leave, just connect your external disk and set SuperDuper up to do its thing. When you get back, your computer will be all backed up, and you can even boot it from the backup if something goes wrong. If you update the backup regularly, you never have to worry about losing important data, and you can restore everything really quickly if you have a hard disk failure / accidentally erase your startup disk / etc.

Buy SuperDuper!

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Clone your current drive to an SSD. Buy an enclosure for it. Use SuperDuper! to clone your HDD then replace your old HDD with the new SSD. Boot. Done.

Whenever I've swapped or migrated HDD/SSD, I always use SuperDuper!. It works perfectly.

And I do also use a USB->SATA adapter, then boot off of the externally connected drive to test, before opening up the Mac and swapping drives.

You could save yourself a lot of headache by just installing SuperDuper! instead of backing up by hand. When it finishes, you will have a file-for-file copy of your Mac, which you can then mount like a normal disk and copy things over to your new install. That's how I do it.

Found this quote while doing a search for you ...

>Of course this is possible - iOS sandboxes all applications by default and runs on the same Darwin core as OS X. Apple hasn't chosen to implement this on OS X, so you would have a lot of engineering work to bolt this extra security on top of OS X. In the short run, it might be easier to virtualize the OS if you only need to sandbox one or two applications.

Probably less of a need for you to do it on your system.

I did find that <strong>Super Duper</strong> has isolation portions built into the software for OS testing, but I'm sure you could run your browser/player through it and get the same effect. I don't have experience with it though so up to you to do more research on it.

Most definitely. Battery improvement for me was very slight, but the system speed was dramatically improved. This was a mid-2009 13" MBP.

I did it a few years back, with a Samsung 840 EVO drive, a USB to SATA adapter (something like this), and a copy of SuperDuper to clone the drive.

I simply plugged the new drive in using the adapter, formatted it for Mac using Disk Utility, and ran SuperDuper to clone my drive onto the SSD. When it was done, I shut it down and swapped the drives (using these instructions at iFixit). Put it back together and it fired up immediately -- and much faster!

Absolutely the best upgrade I ever did for that machine. It added significantly to its useful life.

If you do it, use caution when you first remove the hard drive. It's easy to tug on that thing SATA cable and damage it, since it's folded under the drive and out of sight.

The SuperDuper site makes clear that a bootable clone/disk image is a standard feature. Look at the screenshot showing where you can choose what to "Copy". Check out the several links right above that screenshot for more detail about what SuperDuper can do. The software is free to use for a trial period, so give it a test run--see if you can create a bootable clone of your disk.

It's always crucial for work-related data, but even more so if relying on a Hackintosh. Make use of some sort of off-site backups as well as local. Check out SuperDuper.

really you should be using time machine to back up to an external disk and then restoring that backup to the iMac, but if you must copy directly from the other install, i recommend superduper utility

It only allows one installation at a time. This falls well within the terms of use, though I'm not totally sure how hard the newer versions of Windows check. Worst case it's a support call where they authorize the copy of windows again.

Also, you may save yourself some time/energy by cloning the drive rather than doing a time machine backup. SuperDuper is exceptional at that.

Go grab a copy of SuperDuper (http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html). It's worth paying for, but for your purposes right now, the free featureset will do. It's possible to do this with Disk Utility as well, but it's just not quite as straightforward.

Now go grab an external USB disk at least as big as your current internal disk. Use Disk Utility to give it a GUID partition table, and at least one partition of the same size as your internal disk.

Now open SuperDuper, and tell it to copy your internal to the external. This will probably take a while, so running it overnight or while you head out to school/work is a good idea.

Once it's done, shut down your machine, then boot up holding the Option key. You should get a list of disks you can start from, and your external should be amongst them. Boot from it. It should look exactly like booting from your internal disk (just a little slower, since USB is slower than SATA).

Once you've verified your backup works, shut down, remove the external disk, and boot from your internal. Then do whatever upgrade you're looking to do. If you need to revert, you can do so in exactly the same way (boot from the external, run SuperDuper, copy from the external to the internal).

You can buy a USB to SATA connector which will let you plug in your hard drive in USB. The Mac can automatically install Yosemite yes. Just copy with Finder, don't use Time Machine. You can restore your files using Superduper, which will make a clone of your old hard drive. I recommend this approach.

Backups:
* Online: Backblaze, $50/year unlimited offsite backup (because what if there's a fire at your house)
* External: SuperDuper! I've used it for years, it's great software, plug in the drive, it launches SuperDuper! and does an incremental backup (only what's changed) to the drive

If you switch out the optical drive I would recommend using the SSD as you main drive. (also have you checked out the wonderful land of eBay)

I bought a Samsung 850 EVO and got this SATA to USB cable with it and copied my main drive using SuperDuper.

Foolproof way to find out:

Superduper your drive to a 256GB external HDD. Install Yosemite. If you don't like it, Superduper your drive back.

I just swapped out for an SSD.

I used SuperDuper! to make a back back up to an external hard drive. Confirmed the backup was bootable by choosing it at boot. (hold option immediately after the power button when booting the computer)

Then I just swapped out the drives. When I first installed the new drive it wasn't recognizable. Had to go into Disk Utility and "erase" the new drive. This process also formats the drive so it is recognizable I think. Then I could use SuperDuper to copy everything from the external to the SSD.

I agree, no problems with CS6 on Yosemite for me.

Before I do an upgrade of anything major, I do a full disk image backup with SuperDuper.

If I have any problems, I can just revert directly back to this disk image and my system will be restored completely back to its previous state.

Super Duper! I'm not sure about booting off an external drive (I use a hackintosh) but booting off a cloned internal drive is no problem.

Alternatively, you can use Disk Manager to clone a disk straight from an OSX utility; here's a tutorial. Not sure about how bootable they are though.

time machine backup to an external is your easiest option if you wanna save everything.

If you have the tools to open the laptop AND an usb enclosure or adapter for the new SSD, you can use SuperDuper! to copy everything.

Really simple, actually.

This iMore HOWTO explains it very concisely.

1. Connect your new drive (via USB or Thunderbolt). Format it as Mac OS Extended (Journaled)
2. Use SuperDuper to make a complete backup.
3. You're done.

You can test the backup by rebooting into Target Disk mode and selecting the backup drive, but you should not have a problem if the backup log doesn't report an issue.

USB RAM sticks and flash drives are the same thing. Also, pretty much all macbook airs have an SSD, so I don't think that would make it insecure in any way. The way I understand it is: You're distributing the bandwidth demand by using 2 drives (one as "ram" loaded with your samples) and also benefit from using different ports (i.e. pcie/sata and the USB bus) to avoid a bottle neck to the processor.

However, when you said... > late 2010 Macbook Air 1.7 GHz Intel Core i5

Did you mean 2011? Because I don't believe there was a 2010 macbook air with an i5. Either way like /u/Kosmic_Koala mentioned earlier, >Yosemite's Kernel tasks (the backbone of the OS that runs things below the GUI) takes up more ram than previous OS's like Mountain Lion.

You could backup your macbook air to an external hard drive using Super Duper and then try installing Yosemite if you really want to try it. This will make it a lot easier to downgrade if you don't like it.

A clean OS install is a good idea in any event but honestly, I would hold off on the upgrade for now. Stick with 10.8.

What I did was get an SDD with equal or larger capacity than the HDD I had, then cloned the drive using SuperDuper!

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Then swapped out the HDD with the SDD in the Macbook.

Short answer is no, it's meant to backup to external drives only. Maybe with some tinkering you could, but you're probably better off using another app designed for this, instead.

I've heard good things about SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner (both paid).

A fusion drive is just a regular HD with a substantial amount of flash memory for use as cache. That flash storage is automatically managed by the drive's software, resulting in improved startup times (after a few uses) for the OS and some apps.

From reading your post, it appears you have two drives (an "old" traditional HD and new SSD). How best to set these up depends on a few things

Would the current contents of the HD fit entirely on the SSD? If so, skip installing OS X and use a something like SuperDuper or Carbon Copy Cloner to copy the HD to the SSD. You can then boot from the SSD and (once satisfied that everything works... give it several days), wipe the HD and use it for supplementary storage.

If the SSD isn't large enough, then you have to work a little harder. I would still use SuperDuper or CCC to duplicate drives, but omit "big ticket" items like music, movies, and pictures. Then you can delete everything but those from the HD (watch for hidden files) and link to them with shortcuts. If you have a spare external floating around, it might be less work to copy those large files to the external, then wipe the HD and copy them back. It may take longer in transfer times, but you can start it copying and do something else (like sleep!).

I recommend after you get your SSD to back up everything with your time machine, but don't try to restore to the SSD... I had a mid-2012 and it would never get past the boot screen.

So I got SuperDuper! which literally made the SSD identical to the HDD (they were about a 20GB difference too). Then once the SSD was cloned I found some terminal code to enable trim.

Carbon Copy cloner or SuperDuper both use Rsync (a low level unix copy method) work on any volume (or even folder directories) and (I think paid in both cases) can do incremental mirroring...

Both are fantastic. I use it exactly like you're intending to.

It worked!

Here's what I did.
Started with 3 drives
1. boot (internal SSD)
2. data (internal HDD)
3. data2 (external HDD)

Using SuperDuper! (seriously love this software) I cloned data to data2. They are now bit for bit copies of each other. I then quit all apps that are "using" the data drive (iTunes, torrent client, etc.). In disk utility I unmount data. Once successfully removed I renamed data2 to data.

Now all I have to do is clone my boot drive to my new computer's SSD and I should be set. =D

> Is there a way to make an image and put it on a new drive?

Yes, but you'll need another disk that's as large as the space used on your current disk. It's called making an image/iso/dmg of a disk. Open DiskUtility and then select the disk you want to make an image of. Then go to the File menu and select New > Disk from disk0 (or whichever disk you want). You'll want to make the destination somewhere on the external disk. What happens next is a bit complicated, but I guess you could try getting another external disk and then "restoring" (Disk Utility term) that image to the new external disk. Other people probably have better ways to do this, but that's how I would do it.

Edit: You could also save the image to the bad disk, but that might be a bit dangerous and you'll need half your space free to do so.

Edit 2: Haven't tested this with a BootCamp partition... That might complicate things. You may need to clone the Windows partition separately. Nevertheless, you could give this a shot and see if it works for you.

> Also, I'm guessing I'll need to make a bootable recovery partition on an external drive?

Not necessarily, but if you want to have a bootable backup, take a look at SuperDuper! and Carbon Copy Cloner.

> Every six minutes sounds fishing? Is it some sort of software issue?

What is the exact message? That will help us see what the issue really is. I/O errors are almost always related to a bad disk/hardware. The 6 minutes thing is interesting, but wouldn't be uncommon if the OS is reading or writing on the same sector as part of a periodic task.

Yes, its essentially the same as CCC. From what I can tell the main differences are that CCC can copy across the network. SuperDuper also ignores some files that Apple recommends you don't back up (some caches etc).

Both would create a bootable disk that migration assistant could import from.

I'll give it a shot. Is the SSD already in your iMac? Have you already reinstalled Mac OS X to this SSD? Are you trying to restore an EARLIER time machine backup? Regardless, my answers...

1. Onto an external drive would be tough. Only way to to it (probably) would be to install Mac OS X onto the external drive, do a Time Machine recovery, and then clone that external drive to your SSD using SuperDuper.

2. For TRIM, get TrimEnabler.

3. Ehhh, SMC Fan Control MIGHT do what you're looking for.

Exactly. Add Crashplan for off-site backup, and now you have a strategy. Edit: I use SuperDuper instead of CCC, you might like to check that out too.

Simple copy of your hard drive to an external -

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Slower than what I'm used to on the PC side but we keep up 60 macs at work with this.

I can't speak from experience but based on this Apple Discussion Page it sounds like you'd have to restore from a backup or do a complete reinstall. You can use SuperDuper! for free to create a bootable backup.

That's how I store my originals and LR catalog. It's all on my hard drive. Just get a second hard drive to back it up.

I use this to back up my hard drives so I have identical external hard drives in case one dies. It will update any edits you make in LR when it backs up.

http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/SuperDuperDescription.html

Your hard drive needs to be re-formatted. You could completely wipe, format, and reinstall the OS. Alternatively, you could use a tool like SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner to create a bootable backup, boot to it, wipe the hard drive, then copy the backup onto the freshly wiped hard drive. This process will rearrange the data on your hard drive so that you create a continuous section of free space that can accomodate your Boot Camp partition. Good luck!

With Safari (5.1), disable automatic opening of "safe" downloads.
Safari -> Preferences -> General Tab: uncheck the "Open 'safe' files after downloading" box.
This was how the MacDefender trojan propagated itself earlier this year.

For full disk backups (in addition to the incrementals of Time Machine), I recommend SuperDuper!. I have yet to try this with an encrypted drive, but it does a good job of cloning the standard hard drive, even in the free/unregistered state. I've used it to make bootable backups, handy when upgrading to a larger hard drive in the computer.

A clean install means wiping the drive, so the answer to your question is no. But you can make a bootable clone of your internal hard drive to an external disk. Carbon Copy Cloner (free) or SuperDuper! (paid) can handle this. Then do a format and OS install on the internal, install the apps you need, then move over things like your mail, iTunes and Aperture libraries.

Just out of curiosity (now that your problem is resolved), was there a reason why you had to use Terminal and couldn't use Disk Utility's Restore function, Carbon Copy Cloner, or Super Duper?

This. If you can do Time Machine, you absolutely should.

If you can't, because you're using an older version of OS X or something else, SuperDuper is a really good way of making whole-disk backups.

Carbon Copy Cloner or Super Duper are two programs that will allow you to do a complete, bootable backup of your hard drive onto another hard drive before you install Snow Leopard.

If you are using a drive that came from a PowerPC mac (not super likely) you will have to take the additional step of changing the Partition Scheme of the hard drive from the older Apple Partition Map scheme to the newer Globally Unique Identifier Partition Table (GPT) scheme. That can be done using the built-in disk utility and is explained here

There are options to do things like Zero Out the Data or perform a Low Level Format. Those options are unnecessary and time consuming. I would forgo them.

If you are planning to dual boot Windows and Mac OS X, now is a good time to plan ahead. You can set aside a smaller partition for Boot Camp, the dual boot capability built-in to Mac OS X.

MasterBob pointed you to a good article, but the gist of it is: Restart holding down the "C" key and you will come to the Mac OS X installer on the Snow Leopard disk. You will be able to use the disk utility before installing in order to format the drive.

Good luck, and PM me if you need further assistance.

I'm not the original poster of this thread, but I couldn't get Carbon Copy working with my Bootcamp partition. I used Super Duper to back up my Bootcamp Partition, followed the steps geniusdude recommended, and then used Super Duper again to restore my bootcamp partition. Might work for you!